Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2509.20315

Multilingual Hope Speech Detection: A Comparative Study of Logistic Regression, mBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa with Active Learning

Abstract

Hope speech language that fosters encouragement and optimism plays a vital role in promoting positive discourse online. However, its detection remains challenging, especially in multilingual and low-resource settings. This paper presents a multilingual framework for hope speech detection using an active learning approach and transformer-based models, including mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa. Experiments were conducted on datasets in English, Spanish, German, and Urdu, including benchmark test sets from recent shared tasks. Our results show that transformer models significantly outperform traditional baselines, with XLM-RoBERTa achieving the highest overall accuracy. Furthermore, our active learning strategy maintained strong performance even with small annotated datasets. This study highlights the effectiveness of combining multilingual transformers with data-efficient training strategies for hope speech detection.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

T. O. Abiola, K. D. Abiodun, O. E. Olumide, O. O. Adebanji, O. Hiram Calvo, Grigori Sidorov. 2025-09-24. Multilingual Hope Speech Detection: A Comparative Study of Logistic Regression, mBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa with Active Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20315

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

LiSeCo: Linear Semantic Control for Language Generation

The prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in critical applications highlights the need for controlled language generation methods that are both computationally efficient and enjoy performance guarantees. To address this need, we use a common model of concept semantics as linearly represented in an LLM's latent space. In particular, we take the view that natural language generation traces a trajectory in this continuous semantic space, realized by the language model's hidden activations. This view permits a control-theoretic treatment of text generation in latent space, in which we propose Linear Semantic Control (LiSeCo), a lightweight, gradient-free intervention that dynamically steers trajectories away from regions corresponding to undesired meanings. In particular, we propose to directly intervene, in an online fashion, the activations of the token that is being generated in embedding space. Crucially, LiSeCo does not simply steer activations towards a desirable region. Instead, it relies on classical techniques from control theory to precisely control activations in a context-dependent way, and guarantees that they are brought into a specific pre-defined region of embedding space that corresponds to allowed semantics. The intervention is computed in closed form according to an optimal controller formulation, minimally impacting generation time. This control of the activations in embedding space allows for fine-grained steering of attributes of the generated sequence. We demonstrate that our approach is effective on different tasks -- toxicity, sentiment, and language (English/Spanish) steering -- while maintaining text quality.

cs.CL

VMMU: A Vietnamese Multitask Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark

We introduce VMMU, a Vietnamese Multitask Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark designed to evaluate how vision-language models (VLMs) interpret and reason over visual and textual information beyond English. VMMU consists of 2.5k multimodal questions across 7 tasks, covering a diverse range of problem contexts, including STEM problem solving, data interpretation, rule-governed visual reasoning, and abstract visual reasoning. All questions require genuine multimodal integration, rather than reliance on text-only cues or OCR-based shortcuts. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source VLMs on VMMU. Despite strong Vietnamese OCR performance, proprietary models achieve only 66% mean accuracy. Further analysis shows that the primary source of failure is not OCR, but instead multimodal grounding and reasoning over text and visual evidence. Code and data are available at https://vmmu-bench.github.io/

cs.CL

RapidUn: Influence-Driven Parameter Reweighting for Efficient Large Language Model Unlearning

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) remains challenging because full retraining is costly, while approximate methods often struggle to remove targeted behaviors without degrading retained utility, especially under limited post-deployment supervision. We consider a practical PEFT setting for targeted behavioral contamination removal with a small forget set, a limited retain buffer, and LoRA-only updates, and propose RapidUn, an influence-guided framework that converts cross-sample influence estimates into fixed sample-specific weights for weighted LoRA unlearning. Across Llama-3-8B on Dolly-15k and Alpaca-57k, with cross-model validation on Mistral-7B + Dolly-15k, RapidUn achieves lower seen-trigger and OOD-trigger-family ASR than Fisher, GA, and LoReUn while maintaining competitive clean utility. On Llama-3-8B + Alpaca-57k, it achieves a 77x wall-clock speedup over the clean-corpus LoRA retraining reference. Complementary TOFU, semantic LLM-judge, and IFEval evaluations further support the effectiveness of influence-guided sample reweighting beyond the controlled trigger benchmark.

cs.CL